He thought he had got away with the murders of two women for more than three decades, and used his job as a hospital maintenance worker to access mortuaries where he sexually abused dead bodies.

An inquiry found Fuller was able to offend for 15 years in mortuaries without being suspected or caught due to "serious failings" at the hospitals where he worked.

Here, Sky News looks at the crimes he committed - and how he evaded justice for so long.

'Bedsit murders'

Fuller's first murder victim was 25-year-old Wendy Knell, the manager of a SupaSnaps store in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where he took photographs to be developed.

Her boyfriend found her naked body in the blood-stained bed of her bedsit in June 1987. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Five months after killing Ms Knell, Fuller abducted Caroline Pierce, 20, outside her bedsit home. She was a waitress at Buster Brown's restaurant, which he had visited.

Her body, naked apart from a pair of tights, was discovered by a farm worker in a flooded drain 40 miles away in Romney - an area Fuller knew from cycling trips.

Murder detectives investigated for many weeks, but forensic samples were poor and with no established DNA database to help identify the killer, the operation was scaled back.

The crimes became known as the "bedsit murders" and remained unsolved for more than 30 years.

Bodies of at least 101 women and girls abused

Fuller worked as a general maintenance worker at the now-closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital in Pembury.

He sexually abused the bodies of at least 101 women and girls - aged between nine and 100 - between 2005 and 2020.

Fuller used his access-all-areas swipe card to enter the morgue and sexually penetrate the bodies of females who had died in accidents, on the wards or in the operating theatre.

Unlike other parts of the mortuary, there was no CCTV in the post-mortem room - a usual practice to preserve the dignity of patients.

The doors to the fridges where bodies were stored were unlocked in the post-mortem room, allowing him to access the corpses.

An examination of Fuller's computer hard drive at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex, revealed 818,051 images and 504 videos of his abuse, as well as evidence of his "persistent interest" in rape, abuse and murder of women.

Read more:
David Fuller 'destroyed our souls', say victims' families
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How was David Fuller caught?

Advanced DNA techniques identified Fuller as the bedsit murderer - which led police to discovering his necrophilia.

In 2019, an enhanced DNA sample from Ms Pierce's tights boosted a reinvestigation, but the breakthrough came from a sample from Ms Knell's body.

Checks on a national database showed a close match to 90 people - which police detectives were able to whittle down, eventually identifying a relative of Fuller, before finding Fuller himself.

When police went to his house, he denied knowing the two women, but he was arrested in December 2020 and his DNA matched the killer's. His fingerprint matched one in blood on a plastic bag found in Ms Knell's bedsit.

It was during a search of his house and home office that detectives found hidden computer hard drives, CDs, and floppy discs with more than 14 million images of sex offences.

He initially denied murder - but he pleaded guilty to the two murders on the sixth day of the trial in 2021.

Fuller also admitted 44 charges relating to 78 women and girls in mortuaries between 2008 and November 2020.

In total, the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate was able to identify 101 victims in mortuaries.

Fuller was given a whole-life prison term in December 2021, meaning he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The 69-year-old - who was branded "monster in the morgue" in the title of a Sky documentary about his crimes - was sentenced again in December 2022 for the further abuse of 23 bodies.